Recent additions to the Heap of Links…

1. “Despite Armstrong and Stove’s efforts, Sydney Philosophy continued to radicalise” — the political differences that split University of Sydney Philosophy into two departments for over 25 years, and how David Armstrong became known as “The Beast”
2. “Six Commandments for Getting the Most Out of Graduate School” — a guide by Doug Portmore (ASU), published a couple of years ago at DN
3. “We cannot allow the novelty of virtual worlds to blind us to the risks of relocating our social and economic activity into a realm that is privately owned and controlled by unaccountable corporations” — Max Hayward (Sheffield / Harvard) on the Metaverse
4. “I have grown much more aware of the multiplicity of ways that the organization of professional activities can be simultaneously zones of work, possible intellectual exchange, and joy, while also be structures of exclusion” — Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) is interviewed about his career, blogging, and living and working with COVID
5. “These results suggest an inherent difficulty in accurately appreciating how engaging just thinking can be, and could explain why people prefer keeping themselves busy, rather than taking a moment for reflection and imagination in our daily life” — a new study finds that people underestimate how much they enjoy just thinking
6. “When I consider my own reasons for doing philosophy, and also the set of philosophers that I find attractive and whose thoughts I wish to incorporate into my own, there seems to me a sort of dualism that I have not yet integrated” — Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) on the “basically pleasant bureaucrat” and the “sexy murder poet”
7. “I tried giving some of these [large language model, or LLM] systems standard topics that one might assign in an introductory ethics course and the results were similar to the kind of work that I would expect from first-year college students” — an important essay from John Symons (Kansas) on the value of what we learn when we learn to write, and how the imminent widespread use of LLMs by students endangers this

Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. Discussion welcome.

The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thanks!